» 'Glenn Beck's '10 per cent of Muslims in world are terrorists' claims are "total nonsense"'

'Glenn Beck's '10 per cent of Muslims in world are terrorists' claims are "total nonsense"'

International

Abdul Nisar

Posted By: Abdul Nisar

Published: Tuesday, December 14, 2010, 17:00 [IST]

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Washington, Dec 14 (ANI): Fareed Zakaria, an Indian-born journalist who is best known as political pundit, has slammed Fox News host Glenn Beck over his claim that 10 percent of Muslims across the world are terrorists, and questioned his ability drawing exact calculation as far as maths is concerned.

Last week, Beck had said: "What is the number of Islamic terrorists? 1 percent? I think it's closer to 10%, but the rest of the P.C. world will tell you, 'Oh no, it's miniscule."

Beck first made the claim in his 2003 book "The Real America," in which he had said that 90 percent of Islam is peaceful, while 10 percent of Islam "wants us dead."

Fareed Zakaria, the former editor of Newsweek International, fired back at Beck's claims on his CNN show "GPS" on Sunday night.

"Let's do a bit of math here. There are 1,570,000,000 Muslims worldwide. Take ten percent of those Muslims and you get 157,000,000. That's how many Muslim terrorists Glenn Beck is suggesting there are in the world," Zakaria said.

Citing data from the U.S. State Department, which reported roughly 11,000 terror attacks worldwide in 2009, Zakaria multiplied that number by 100, on the "generous" assumption that each attack took 100 terrorists, even though most were committed solo or by small groups.

Even using that exaggerated figure would mean 1,100,000 people were involved in terrorist acts last year, Zakaria said.

"Glenn Beck's figure is 150,000 times higher than that. It is total nonsense. A figure made up by Glenn Beck with absolutely no basis in fact," he added. (ANI)